s/who books like "The Secret" outsell/who cause books like "The Secret" to outsell/

This study tries to figure out in what way the average person enjoys a story. Aside from the fact that asking people to rate things from 1 to 10 is a great way to determine their favorite numbers and very little else, even if the study were completely accurate I wouldn't care. Why? Because the average person is the guy who makes Michael Bay, Twilight, The Jersey Shore, and Justin Bieber popular. They are the people who books like "The Secret" outsell actual literature. It's already well-established that the average person is worse than useless, dragging us into the gutter and away from the stars. If this research could start to teach us to fix what's wrong with the average person then maybe it'd be worthwhile, but it's clear from the researchers' comments that they actually think that there's something *okay* about the fact that people have gotten so stupid that they can't even follow a simple plot without having the Cliff's Notes embedded into the first paragraph.

If your idea is that the average person alive today -- never mind the average high school student -- has any knowledge at all of relativistic mechanics, evolutionary biology, computer science/engineering, medical science, etc., I think you'll find you're sadly mistaken. Yes, the average teenager knows how to use a cell phone. Clearly this is an insurmountable obstacle, and Isaac Newton himself would be unable to figure out my Nokia.

At any rate, the material on the "arithmetic" and "algebra" sections is still taught and used in schools today, and I'll outright guarantee you that if I printed those out and took them to a Calculus III section at the local university I'd be unlikely to get a very high pass rate, despite the fact that most of them have memorized how to take dozens of integrals or apply Lagrange multipliers.

Knowledge isn't worth as much as people seem to think; at its heart, it's just trivia. What matters is the ability to think, and that doesn't change from generation to generation.

Please tell me you're kidding. Latin != Italian.

And for that matter, heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training. Clearly knowledge is worthless except as a bullet on a résumé.

Umm, you realize this is *Rob Pike* you're talking about, right? One of the original developers of UNIX? I'm guessing that, what with working at Bell Labs while they were *inventing* C, he might know a little more about the language than you do.

'Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy'

No, your stocks will be worthless, period. People won't magically be willing to pay more money for stock in a bankrupt company because they weren't allowed to trade the stock for a while. But this isn't really a great example of why liquidity is necessary, because in this case there's not much that can be done. Market liquidity is necessary to allow risks to be reallocated, and risks need to be reallocated on a regular basis, not just once a day. Just because you could conceivably regulate "official" stock prices doesn't mean you can regulate the instantaneous factors that dictate them -- the cost of oil, local and international politics, the weather, etc.

"Remember that extracting wealth from the markets and transferring it from one account to another is not the same thing as 'profit', because it reduces the wealth available to actual productive investment - the corporate processes which do not and cannot change any faster than the time it takes to gear-up a factory or harvest a crop."

Nonsense. Say the price of oil changes; then all of a sudden all sorts of companies make or lose enormous amounts of money. Same thing with interest rates, the weather, natural disasters, international politics, etc. Here's an exercise for you: go buy stock in a pharmaceutical company that's waiting to get approval of a new drug. On principal, refuse to trade it even after the announcement comes out and the price spikes or plunges. Afterwards, you can give us all a nice lecture on how little you care for market liquidity.

For that matter, how do you determine a fair price to pay for your investments? Do you bring up a spreadsheet, model the company's discounted future earnings, and derive the price you're willing to buy and sell at? Of course not. You rely on the market to let you know what a fair price is. Without a liquid market, you might as well be buying stock from some guy who calls you up on the phone.

Of course, I'm going to guess that you or someone else is going to say, "But I just take the high road -- I invest in indexed mutual funds and don't try to beat the market." But what do you think the fund's traders are doing? Just sitting around all day and not trading? All you're doing is paying someone else to execute those same trades for you.

And you didn't even notice that it begins "For all intensive purposes..."

Au contraire. True, you can't walk up to a total stranger on the street and say "I'm going to kill you." This is, however, a normal and completely acceptable way to speak to your ex- (or current!) boyfriend, or really anyone you're on a first-name basis with. Nobody would bat an eye if they heard someone say such a thing in public. It appears, however, that school administrators are all send through some kind of indoctrination progress where they're taught that the internet automatically makes everything more sinister.

Not so. The point of standardized libraries isn't that they're better than third-party ones, but that there aren't competitors. That way all development goes into the same library which everyone is familiar with and there's no bizarre fragmentation to deal with.

The point is that, assuming we've got a guy following around Verizon trucks and pretending to be a tech, he's probably gone to the trouble of printing up some random ID card and laminating it. Since you don't even know what a Verizon ID card looks like it wouldn't even take any research on his part -- it'd just be a card with a downloaded Verizon logo on it, a photograph of him, and a fake name, that had been run through a laminating machine.

So you posit that only one ass at a time can occupy a particular location? If this is true, the implications for physics are asstounding!

The client hired the contractor to do some work for him. They had a real-world contract stating that he was to be paid with real money and was to retain full rights to his creations. From a legal standpoint this is no different from doing graphic design for a website, writing a book and selling limited rights to a publisher, etc. If you hire me to make a baseball bat for you and our contract states that I retain copyright to the design, and then you start selling knockoffs of it, you are not going to be successful in a lawsuit by stating that the official baseball rulebook says nothing about copyright. In other words, the rules of a virtual world do not somehow override the rules of the real world.

It wasn't Second Life that contracted him to do the work, it was someone with a Second Life account. I don't know anything about Second Life, but context seems to imply that there's no straightforward way to do a local backup of these things, i.e. apparently they can only reside on the Second Life servers. As such, the client did not have the right to delete them, because the creator had some rights to them.

A roughly analogous situation would involve your building a duplex (in real life) and selling half of it to me, and my setting the whole thing on fire one day.

Also, you seem to be confusing "imaginary property" with "intellectual property."

Intellectual property = literature, music, code, etc. Protected by copyright law for centuries in a reasonably well-defined system.

Imaginary property = "I have a property right to the record in the game's database that says that my character has 100,000 gold coins and 75 experience points, and if someone in any way indirectly causes and SQL UPDATE statement that affects that record, it's theft."

... to see how this thread will go. Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property, whatever that means, and whether you should be able to prosecute someone for murdering your Elf Lord or whatever. The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted. Take an entirely analogous situation: suppose that Ray Charles -- whose contract stated that he owned the original masters of all his recordings -- goes into a studio to record an album, and the studio subsequently throws said recordings away. Ray would have a pretty solid case, and so does this guy. This case has nothing to do with the MMO aspects of the incident; however, I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.